Now to make it more confusing. I've updated xorg-server, and now if the window is maximized when it boots I see the desktop for a little bit, then X aborts. If I add a sleep 10 before the startx command in .profile, or if the window size isn't maximized from boot (so that it remains vga=791 size), or if I boot to text then startx manually, it works OK. I can resize/maximize it once it is running without problems. This is on 64-bit, I haven't tried 32-bit yet.

[ 28.764] X.Org X Server 1.20.0X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0...[ 28.857] (--) vmware(0): DRM driver version is 2.14.0I do think that requiring a non-stripped binary is a (design) problem, and the wrong way to get a version number. That's what functions are for. I verified this by adding /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers as a search path in open-vm-tools. I copied a non-stripped version of vmware_drv.so from my host to enable KMS: